Back to Australia: rediscovering Sydney and the Whitsunday Islands
Bondi Beach is deserted, nature on the reefs is flourishing and Chris Haslam has the country all to himself... or so it feels
A “Hanrahan”, I learnt on a Sydney bus last week, is an Australian term for a pessimist. A fellow passenger — a pensioner called Gary — had used the term to describe the driver, who was reciting John O’Brien’s 1919 poem about a doom-mongering farmer.
“If we don’t get three inches, man,
Or four to break this drought,
We’ll all be ’rooned,” said Hanrahan,
“Before the year is out.”
It was Monday morning and we were heading south through Sydney’s hip Surry Hills. It’s the kind of neighbourhood that makes monochromatic Brits dream of fleeing Blighty to start a new life, but the bus driver’s point was that it would be a long time before the Poms, and other international visitors, returned.
“ScoMo’s blown it,” he said, referring to the prime minister, Scott Morrison. “You can’t shut down a country at the arse end of the world for two years and expect tourists to come rushing back. That’s just arrogant.”
His pessimism was predictable: after 703 days of sealed borders and oppressive lockdowns, Fortress Australia had that day raised the portcullis to fully vaccinated visitors. That night, the first Qantas flight permitted to bring tourists would touch down at Sydney airport, and, like a rusty tap forced open with a wrench, allow tourists to start dribbling back to this parched land.
The real fear is that it could be a year, or two, or five, before that trickle becomes a viable income stream for Australian tourism.
The feeling of utter loneliness that the Germans call Mutterseelenallein is often expressed here. To us, Australia is just 22 hours away by direct flight. To them, as the bus driver noted, it’s an island at the nether regions of the planet. And while the rest of the world has now woken up to the psychological effects of remote working, naturalised Australians have been feeling that way since the first settlers came ashore at Botany Bay in 1788.
Bondi Beach is nine miles up the coast from that first landfall — the former backpacker ghetto where 33 years ago I quit surf school because of the crowds. Last Monday it was deserted. I’d already wandered like a lost dog in a forgotten city: through the Rocks — Sydney’s Victorian vestige — under the Harbour Bridge and around the waterfront to the Opera House.
Other than a couple from Iron Knob, a family from Wee Waa and a school party from Hell, I was the only tourist. If that sounds grim, it was the opposite. Freed from the oppression and expectations of mass tourism, Sydney could show her true beauty.
Nearly 9½ million tourists visited Australia in 2019. China and New Zealand were the biggest source markets, followed by the US, with the UK in fourth place. That’s small change in global terms; about a tenth of total visitors to Spain or the US. But, as the Sydney Morning Herald travel editor Anthony Dennis points out: “Those visitors stayed far longer and spent more than in other destinations, creating one of the highest-yielding markets in the world.”
No wonder, then, that Tourism Australia has spent £21m on a global campaign to entice us back. But whatever they say, there’s no need to rush.
As the BridgeClimb Sydney CEO Deb Zimmer noted, Australia isn’t an impulse buy. It takes six months or more to plan and prepare for a trip, and even if you can fly sooner, don’t. First, the hospitality industry here is facing the same staff-recruitment challenges as the rest of the world. Potwashers in Sydney have been earning £48 an hour and in Melbourne many restaurants only open from Thursday to Sunday.
Last week in Airlie Beach a red-eyed restaurateur turned me away from a fish restaurant at 8pm because, he said, they couldn’t cope. Second, the global car-hire crisis has sent the cost of a Great Australian Road Trip spiralling, with prices not expected to stabilise until the back end of this year. And the third factor is the Australians themselves.
● Unforgettable Australian experiences
● 14 of the best hotels in Sydney
● Fun things to do in Melbourne
We have Benidorm. They have Bali, but we’ve all had to make compromises. Just as some of us swapped Spain for Whitley Bay, the Australians had to make do with the Whitsundays: an archipelago of 74 paradise islands off the Queensland coast. Aussies are delightful travelling companions; cheerful, magnanimous and seemingly happy to talk with Poms about absolutely anything as long as it’s the Duchess of Cambridge. But, lovely as they are, they take up space.
The homegrown travel boom has sharply reduced availability in popular destinations such as Gold Coast, Byron Bay and Uluru. Hamilton Island’s charter boats are fully booked until 2023, and Darwin-to-Adelaide tourist train the Ghan has just 11 cabins remaining for the year. But as Indonesia, New Zealand, Thailand and the Philippines get back to normal later this year, and grand tours to destinations further afield resume, domestic demand will relax.
So plan now for next autumn, and if you’re wondering if Australia is worth the 22-hour flight, consider this: last Wednesday I boarded a ferry to Whitehaven in the Whitsundays — indisputably the most beautiful beach on Earth. Four miles long, lapped by fluorescent blue water and composed of peroxide-blonde sand that’s 98.9 per cent pure silica, it’s a box-ticker’s beach that has always attracted crowds.
The poor and the climate-aware come by ferry, the Instagrammers and oblivious rich by seaplane and helicopter. When the landing craft hit the beach it’s like D-Day in paradise, the tourists scattering in vain search of solitude, or huddling together as though in fear of such perfection.
Last week it was very different. Stepping ashore in factor-50 sunshine, I walked five minutes north, set up base camp and went for a swim. For company I had a pair of silver gulls, a solitary swallow who perched on my sunshade and a sulphur-crested cockatoo which walked out of the bush, said something to the swallow before giving me a look like a disapproving maitre d’, and walked back into the bush, squawking in exasperation.
In the warm, clear water two green turtles and a hawksbill gave me space. Huge shoals of striped grunter fish didn’t. Nor did the parrotfish, the sweetlips or the clownfish. Tourists or no tourists, Whitehaven was still crowded, and as I boarded the ferry to Hamilton Island for lunch, it struck me that these 150 minutes alone were worth the 22-hour flight.
Escape to Oz
But to the west lay the Queensland shore. Beyond, a continent so vast, so wild and so full of extraordinary, life-enhancing episodes that to contemplate it was like trying to comprehend the infinity of space.
The next day, as I headed back to Brisbane, the rain came down like stair rods. Almost a foot fell in six hours, washing away roads, derailing a train and submerging bridges. That’s eight inches more than Hanrahan needed to beat the drought. Tourism Australia is hoping for visitors to flood back in similar torrents.
Chris Haslam travelled as a guest of Tourism Australia. Trailfinders has a 16-night East Coast Discovery trip from £2,199pp, with a mix of B&B and room-only, including five nights in Sydney, four nights in both Brisbane and Melbourne, and three nights at the Hamilton Island Resort in the Whitsundays. International and internal flights also included
Sign up for our new Times Travel newsletter and follow us on Instagram and Twitter
